By HVvids on April 24, 2012

But this poor teenage girl wasn’t texting when she was swallowed up by a sidewalk sinkhole in Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. She appears to be on the phone but aware of her surroundings.

The incident occurred back in March, but the footage has only started to make the rounds this week. A cab driver named Wang Wei happened to be driving by, saw the scene unfold and jumped out of his vehicle to help her (and welcome change from the ‘bystander effect’ often seen in China).

The cab driver jumped into the six-meter sinkhole with the unnamed girl, and both eventually had to be rescued by firefighters. The area had been eroded by underground water.

Sinkholes seem to be a growing problem in China, at least anecdotally. A 27-year-old named Yang Erjing died two weeks ago a week after falling through a Beijing sidewalk into a pool of scalding water.

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